All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🛠️ Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) now includes a built-in monitoring experience on the environment detail page in the AWS Management Console. A new metrics dashboard consolidates key Amazon CloudWatch metrics with optional toggles to overlay suggested warning ranges to highlight potential issues. The page also lists associated CloudWatch alarms and offers a one-click Create Recommended Alarms action to provision alarms from an AWS-managed template. This capability is available for MWAA Provisioned environments in all supported regions; standard CloudWatch pricing applies.

🔒 Microsoft’s physical security team combined Azure Arc, Azure Virtual Desktop, and Azure monitoring services to centralize management of thousands of distributed servers while preserving local resiliency and security. The approach standardized patching, configuration, and observability across hybrid environments, saving thousands of hours annually and accelerating image and update rollouts. Integration with monitoring and RBAC improved visibility, compliance, and access control without moving workloads offsite.

🔒 Fortinet’s partnership with the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) advances global cyber resilience by combining FortiGuard Labs’ threat intelligence with FIRST’s incident response network. CORE, a 2025 initiative co-founded by Fortinet, funds capacity building, regional training, and tabletop exercises to close skills gaps and improve cross-border coordination. This collaboration also supports standards like EPSS and CVSS to turn shared practices into operational defenses.

🛡️ CREST has awarded its new AI-Enabled Penetration Testing accreditation to 10 firms across Europe, India and the US as an optional module added to its Penetration Testing Accreditation Standard in July 2026. The module lets providers that integrate AI into pentesting undergo independent assessment to demonstrate responsible, secure AI governance to clients and regulators. CREST’s move follows its March 2026 report and subsequent AI Principles and June AI Charter.

🔒 The article argues that asking CISOs to become full business leaders misses a structural problem: alignment is an organizational design issue, not just communication. It proposes a distinct CSO role that sits above cybersecurity to coordinate enterprise protection across data, resilience, regulation and operations. The CSO would provide authority to reconcile competing priorities while the CISO remains accountable for technical delivery, creating clearer ownership and better business protection.

🔧 Microsoft is addressing a known bug causing Microsoft Teams and the new Outlook to crash or fail to launch on ARM-based Windows devices after August 2026 updates. The issue mainly affects Surface Pro 11 and Surface Laptop 7 running Windows 11 24H2 or later, particularly on new or freshly imaged PCs without Microsoft Store updates. As a temporary workaround, Microsoft advises installing the Auto Super Resolution Package (v1.0.19.0+) via Microsoft Store. A permanent fix will be delivered in a future Windows update.

🛡️ Amazon Web Services has launched the public preview of Amazon Linux 2027 (AL2027), a cloud-native OS built on AL2023 for web, database, container, and AI/ML workloads. AL2027 uses kernel 7.1+, enables SELinux enforcing by default, and boosts crypto performance with AWS-LC. Preview AMIs and container images are available across commercial regions for x86-64 and ARM, with feedback accepted via the AL2027 GitHub repository.

🚀 For the ninth consecutive year, Gartner has positioned Google as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services, ranked furthest for Completeness of Vision. Google highlights a co-designed technology stack from custom silicon to agentic applications, a dynamic infrastructure for secure global scale, and flexible digital sovereignty options. The post emphasizes AI-driven modernization, workload-optimized compute, hybrid/multicloud operation, and sovereign cloud deployments.

🔒 Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) now supports S/MIME signing, enabling recipients to verify that messages are authentic and unaltered. Previously, senders had to pre-sign messages before submitting them to SES, adding operational complexity. Now you can store your signing certificate in AWS Certificate Manager and enable S/MIME for your sender identity so SES signs outbound mail automatically. Recipients without S/MIME-capable clients can still read messages normally, and the feature is available in all Regions where SES operates.

🔒 Amazon S3 now supports AWS PrivateLink for endpoints validated under the FIPS 140-3 program, enabling customers to use FIPS-validated cryptographic modules while keeping traffic inside their VPC. To enable, create or edit an interface VPC endpoint for S3 and select the FIPS S3 endpoint. This feature is available at no additional cost in several AWS Regions, including US East, US West, Canada, and AWS GovCloud (US).

🚀 AWS Transform now supports Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP as a general available target for block storage migrations. This enables customers to migrate block workloads directly to FSx for ONTAP alongside compute and network migrations, removing the need for intermediate storage platforms or separate migration tools. Workloads maintain existing data access patterns and operational processes while running on a managed, production-ready shared storage service that combines ONTAP enterprise features with AWS scalability and resiliency. The capability is available in all Regions supported by AWS Transform and FSx for ONTAP.

🔐 This AWS blog explains how to plan and execute an identity source transition in AWS IAM Identity Center, focusing on migrations such as Active Directory to Okta. It outlines destructive and non‑destructive transition scenarios, a five‑step migration runbook, and prerequisites including backup, validation, SCIM configuration, and restore processes. The post also references sample scripts and a migration tool on GitHub to automate prechecks, cutover, validation, and cleanup.

🔒 AWS outlines how the rise of autonomous AI agents demands a shift in security posture from event-driven to continuous, machine-speed detection and response. The post summarizes a collaborative chapter with the SANS Institute in the 2026 Cloud Security Exchange eBook, emphasizing that existing security principles—identity governance, least privilege, and defense in depth—must be adapted for probabilistic, autonomous workloads. AWS highlights built-in platform services like Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, and AWS Security Hub as components to extend trusted controls for agentic AI adoption.

🔎 Amazon Bedrock's Web Search tool is now available in AWS GovCloud (US-West), enabling grounded web results with citations for supported OpenAI GPT models. Web Search keeps request data inside the AWS boundary by default and is governed by IAM so administrators can control access at account, organization, and Region levels. At launch it supports GPT-5.4, GPT-5.6 Terra, and Luna models and joins other US Regions where the capability is already available.

🤖 Amazon Connect Customer now automates performance evaluations for both human and AI agents in Malay using generative AI. Managers can define custom evaluation criteria in natural language and receive AI-generated evaluations with justifications in their preferred language. The feature also supports cross-language evaluation, allowing assessments to be produced in English even when conversations occur in Malay. It is available across eight AWS regions.

🔧Amazon Quick now offers enhanced connector controls and Model Context Protocol (MCP) synchronization for connectors. Admins and connector owners can selectively enable or disable individual tools within a connector and configure tool permission settings to require consent or delegate decisions to end users. MCP sync ensures connectors stay up to date as external MCP servers add or modify tools and metadata. These updates are available in all Regions where Amazon Quick is offered.

🧭 Amazon Connect Customer announces general availability of the agentic CX designer, a no-code canvas for designing and deploying AI-powered voice and digital self-service experiences. The tool combines flowchart-style visual logic with LLM-driven natural conversation while letting teams enforce deterministic workflows for eligibility, approvals, routing, and compliance. Users can build, test, and launch production-ready experiences without code, shortening delivery from months to weeks.

🐞 Google released Mantis, an open-source framework that automates discovery, triage, reproduction, and patching of software vulnerabilities using AI. It combines agentic techniques with sandboxed vulnerability reproduction to reduce hallucinations and improve true-positive rates. Mantis analyzes repository history to build architectural and threat-model documentation and constructs hierarchical security summaries to preserve context while reducing token overhead. The project and examples are available on GitHub and include guidance for sandboxing and using the mantis-advise skill.

🚀 Second-generation AWS Outposts racks are now supported in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West) Regions, extending AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to on-premises data centers and colocation spaces for a consistent hybrid experience. Organizations across startups, enterprises, and the public sector can order Outposts racks connected to these regions to optimize latency and data residency. Outposts enables local low-latency workloads while connecting to a home Region for management, and supports on-premises data processing to meet residency requirements. This expansion gives customers more flexibility in choosing the AWS Region their Outposts connect to.

📣 BigQuery now supports identity columns that automatically generate sequential 64-bit integer values for table rows. This feature simplifies unique identifier management by letting BigQuery handle ID generation natively, reducing ETL complexity and boilerplate SQL. Identity columns integrate with standard DML such as INSERT and MERGE and can be defined in CREATE TABLE statements with options for fully managed sequences or allow manual overrides when needed.